Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, on July 7, 2020, announced the results of a commissioned study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. These services on behalf of Red Hat explored Asia Pacific (APAC) transformation and innovation trajectory compared to the world. The study titled “Understanding APAC’s Success in Digital Transformation” surveyed 143 business executives belonging to APAC from various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, and IT sectors.
The finding of the study states that Asian firms have worked well on the concept of digital transformation. It is not just for growth purposes but also for survival. The APAC transformation can be translated major business benefits, which may help companies bring new products and services in the market at a faster speed than their global counterparts.
Focus points of the report:
- There are 95% of APAC executives who believe that digital transformation has gained importance over the past 18 months.
- Only 40% of APAC executives are quickly creating and delivering new applications in the market.
- About 80% of APAC business leaders value technology advancement and cultural change for overall digital transformation.
The term “cultural change,” includes factors such as collaboration (44%), inclusivity (42%), adaptability (41%), and transparency (40%). As per the study, it was also revealed that companies looking to transform digitally would need to support their cultural change, besides putting efforts in modernizing infrastructure and application architecture.
Implementing the initiatives toward cultural change and application architecture, the companies under APAC can achieve the following:
- Easily adopt continuous integration of delivery methods
- Quick development and delivery of new applications
- Efficient and easy modernization of systems
- Limit the cost of maintenance
- Fast response to the demands of customers
Sajeeve Bahl, Vice President and Head, Services, Red Hat APAC, said, “Many businesses are now pressured to deliver products and customer satisfaction in an efficient and agile manner. Companies in Asia Pacific have been exemplary in driving digital transformation by using technology to support cultural change, which enables them to embrace open source principles, such as collaboration, inclusivity, and transparency. By combining this with open source tools, they can retool the way they work to accelerate innovation and sustain competitiveness.”
Anthony Watson, Lead, Enterprise Domains, ANZ Bank, said, “Transformation isn’t something that happens for only a focused period of time, and then there’s no change after that. Our maxim is that constant change is a part of our organization’s DNA — and that of other organizations across the region as well. We set the expectation throughout our organization that we will be evolving constantly. Our company is using technology to modernize operations to deliver services faster and more efficiently. Technology also lets us better integrate customer feedback as we develop new financial products.”
The APAC executives will move toward artificial intelligence and machine learning in the next 12–18 months as a part of the digital transformation crusade. Additionally, there will be an increase in investments across cloud-based business applications and business process automation tools.
